Overview

Michelle-Angela Blank was said to dance before she could walk. At the age of 9, she began attending hip-hop dance classes. A year later, she preceded towards jazz and ballet training as well and continued this path until moving onto Ballroom Dancing. At the age of 14, Michelle took her first lesson in the American Style at a nearby Arthur Murray Dance Studio.

After falling in love with this new specialty, Michelle began training in the International Latin division and soon afterwards began her competitive path as a Youth athlete.

Michelle began progressing very quickly. In 2013, she became the Champion of the Youth Latin Pre-Championship at the City DanceSport Challenge. It was her first competition with a partner and deemed itself a rewarding experience.

After only a couple of years, Michelle had come from the very basics of syllabus dancing to competing in Amateur Championships. In 2015, she met Igor Golovach, a young dancer who had just arrived from Ukraine to dance in the USA. Together, they would continue their competitive paths.

In December, Igor and Michelle traveled to Riga, Latvia to compete internationally for the first time at the Baltic Grand Prix in the WDSFAmateur Rising Star and International Open Championships. The days prior to the competition, they participated in the Baltic Grand Prix Workshops where they met and trained with Alexey Silde and Zoran Plohl.

Entrepreneurship

At a very early age, Michelle was actively involved with her father’s work, learning hands on how to build and run a business. Her early business training led her to become a determined entrepreneur with highly developed business acumen.

As soon as Michelle and Igor started working together, they immediately bonded as not only a dancing couple, but also as partners who were alike in their views and goals regarding their future careers. Together, they soon realized the need of a community data center to provide all dance enthusiasts with a one-stop information hub. The idea was to create an encyclopedia that would become an information center for all things DanceSport. Together, they founded WikiDanceSport.com, a free-access, free-content Internet encyclopedia of Ballroom Dancing.

Igor and Michelle also started working on a new venture known as DanceSport Studio (DSS). DSS is a cross-federation collaborative training platform, pertaining to the Freedom to Dance and Equality & Fairness decree, that is on the path to establishing one uniform Art of DanceSport Training System for competitive and social dancers in all aspects of fitness, health, and wellbeing (physical, mental, emotional, social, and spiritual). DSS encompasses organizations as well as individuals of multiple federations that work together as one unit in order to accomplish the highest standards of DanceSport training and education.

The couple is also developing DanceSport Rankings (DSR). This idea was driven by the necessity to uniform and synchronize DanceSport industry related activities. The platform will offer a way to rank and rate the individuals, organizations, and events of the industry based on various criteria, historical data, performances, and popularity and will allow athletes to participate in the opinion sharing and evaluation of said models.

Michelle is also working on her own fashion brand known as Michellino, which will offer a wide range of clothing, shoes, and accessories specific to the DanceSport industry's performance and training.

Get involved!

How it works

WikiDanceSport has been created for the DanceSport community to collaboratively organize and promote this sport throughout the world.
Anyone who can access this site can edit most of its articles and create new ones.

Only registered users may create a new article. Some particularly controversial, sensitive and/or vandalism-prone pages are protected to some degree from public alteration. A particularly contentious article may be locked so that only administrators are able to make changes.

In certain cases, all editors are allowed to submit modifications, but review is required for some editors, depending on certain conditions.